Be sure to read part one of Time is Short: An Interview with Michael Carter.
Time is Short: There are a lot of folks out there who support the use of underground action and sabotage in defense of Earth, but for any number of reasons—family commitments, physical limitations, etc.—can’t undertake that kind of action themselves. What do you think they can do to support those willing and able to engage in militant action?
Michael Carter: Speak out and be vocal in support of the idea, in the first place. That’s one of the reason it’s important for aboveground people to promote the need for underground action, so those who might be considering taking that kind of action know they’re not alone in the world. Even if you’re not actually talking to them they need to know that someone out there is behind them.
And financial support for those who are arrested. When environmentalists were fighting logging in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, Paul Watson (of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society) offered to pay the legal defense of anyone who got caught tree-spiking. A legal defense fund for people arrested for underground action would be helpful.
And support of prisoners. If people see that prisoners aren’t just forgotten after a month, I think that could make a difference too. Getting letters in jail is a huge morale booster. Or especially if they have families, and they know that their loved ones won’t suffer if they’re arrested; that’s going to be a big deal for them. Having some sort of infrastructure in place to support folks who get caught would be great. If we had known that someone was going to help if something horrible happened, we may have taken more initiative, and may actually have been able to engineer effective actions. If underground actions are going to work, they have to be serious, and fighters need support to fight seriously.
TS: What have you learned from your experience? Looking back on what you did all those years ago, what’s your perspective on your actions now? Is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
MC: Well I definitely would have taken steps to not get caught. That kind of goes without saying, and it would have been easy, I’m sorry to say. It would have been a simple matter even for an 18 year old to work out how not to get caught. I also would have picked my targets more carefully. And I would have entered into an understanding with myself that my enemy is completely relentless. It’s only a system; it’s composed of people, but the enemy is a system. It can’t be reasoned with; it has no sanity, no sense of morality, no love of anything. Its job is to consume. That’s it. And that’s what I would have tried to focus on, not the people running it or those who were dependent on it, but the system itself. I would have tried to find the weaknesses in the system, and then attacked those.
What I’d have done, back when I was completely unknown—when I had no public opinion and wasn’t identified as an environmentalist or anything else—I would have started picking the most vulnerable targets, striking at those, being extremely careful, not allowing my emotions to guide my strategy or tactics. My emotions might get me there in the first place—I don’t think you could get to that point without a strong emotional response—but once I arrived at the decision to act, I would have done everything I could to think like a soldier, and pick expensive and hard-to-replace targets.
I could never do anything like that again, because anytime an action happens, I’m going to be on a shortlist of people who the government will investigate. And I don’t think I was very good at it anyway. But if I had a clean slate, that’s definitely what I would do.
TS: You were fairly isolated and alone in taking the actions you took. Earlier, you talked about the importance of the larger context. How do you see those two ideas connecting? Do you think it makes a difference for saboteurs to be acting in the context of a larger movement with some kind of coordination?
MC: I think having some kind of coordinated attack strategy would be excellent. Absolutely try to build a network. We had no hope of accomplishing that at the time. We didn’t have the savvy, a larger analysis or context to work in, or a means of communicating with others. The actions were mostly symbolic, and symbolic actions are just a huge waste of risk. It’s a waste of political capital too. Most everyone is going to hate the action, so it might as well count. Underground actions are not going to change anyone’s mind, not that anything will. They will make most everyone angry, and make activists vulnerable to arrest, so if the actions are only symbolic, nothing will have been accomplished. If people are ready and willing to risk their lives and their freedom then they should go for it. Fight to win, not just to fight, or to make some sort of abstract point.
TS: Do you still think militant and illegal forms of direct action and sabotage are justified? Why?
MC: Oh yeah. I mean, in an ideal world I don’t think it’s the best way to accomplish anything, but obviously this isn’t an ideal world, and our circumstances are getting worse and worse, so what does that leave us?
One of the reasons it’s so unpopular is that it’s always presented as attacks on individuals, rather than on a system. And I think it’s important to frame it that way, as an attack on an unjust, destructive system. That begins with the understanding that civilization is not us, and not the highest expression of human endeavor, it’s just an idea. Civilization is masquerading as humanity, but that’s not what it is.
The argument that physically militant actions are counterproductive has a little bit of merit because the scale they’ve happened on hasn’t been large enough to have any impact. You’re left with the political fallout, the mainstream activists distancing themselves and all the bad stuff that comes with it, but you don’t have any end effect. It needs to happen on a larger scale. Fighters need to select better targets, be more strategic and be more impactful. They need to think big. That’s how militaries accomplish their goals, with physical militant action. They blow shit up. They blow up bridges, they take out buildings, they disable the enemy arsenal, they kill the enemy—that’s how they function. And that’s not to associate or identify with militaries, but we need to pay attention to what’s actually going to get the job done. At a certain point, our sense of morality isn’t going to matter; it just isn’t going to have any relevance in a world that’s 20 degrees hotter than it is now.
So on balance, yes I wish it could all be nonviolent, Civil Rights movement-style. But we just don’t have enough social cohesion to engineer that kind of thing. There’s so few of us that give a shit anyways, and we’re so scattered, isolated and fragmented. We just don’t have those kinds of numbers or that kind of power, and I don’t see that changing.
Everywhere we look we’re losing, and one of the reasons is that we don’t have a movement that says “No. You’re not going to do that. We will stop this, whatever it takes.” Our political power is weak to begin with, and backsliding. Aboveground activists need to advocate a lesser evil, to continually pose the question of what is worse: that some property was destroyed, or that sea shells are dissolving in acid oceans?
TS: Obviously, you’ve participated in a wide range of actions, spanning the spectrum from traditional legal appeals to militant sabotage. With this unique perspective, what do you see as being the most promising strategy for the environmental movement?
MC: We need more of everything, more of whatever we can assemble. There’s no denying that a lot of perfectly legal mainstream tactics can work well. I’m not saying we can litigate our way to sustainability, but for the people who are able to do that, that’s what they should be doing. Those who don’t have access to the courts or those resources (which is most everyone) need to find a role in a well-organized movement. So for example, if a lawsuit fails and they start punching a road into the Grand Canyon, there is someone there who can block it with civil disobedience or disable the machinery or something like that.
The Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy as a good place to start. I haven’t given a great deal of thought to particulars in strategy; I don’t know that my mind works well that way. Again, we need more of everything, and no matter how unsure would-be activists (aboveground and underground) feel, it’s best for them to get started, difficult as that is. In my experience it’s the preliminary mistakes and abrupt learning curves that are the hardest times. And cultivating a community of resistance, also hard, makes all the difference in the world.
TS: Is there anything you wish you’d known or been told when you were contemplating underground sabotage? Is there anything you would say to anyone considering militant action?
MC: Security is number one. There are lots of resources about good security practices available whether online or in books like Ecodefense. I would do that first. I would try to anticipate contingencies and surprises, put most of my effort into planning, and then decisively execute the plan.
That’s the most important missing piece right now—the dismantling of infrastructure. It’s one of the places where the system is most vulnerable, so it should be employed right away. It can be effective, but it has to be responsible, careful, and very smart. So yeah, plan it well. But please don’t wait much longer.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
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